Re: Microdata design philosophies

> On Thu, 15 Oct 2009, Martin McEvoy wrote:
> >
> > Microdata is not "Designed for humans first and machines second".
>
> Actually, Microdata has very much been designed for humans first and
> machines second. In fact, to underscore how important humans are in
> Microdata's design, one member company of this working group has even 
> gone
> so far as to do usability testing of several variants of Microdata, to 
> see
> whether some of the proposals for changes to Microdata would actually 
> have
> beneficial effects. (Some did, some didn't. I've since updated the spec
> based on what was learnt from those studies, as well as based on other
> feedback regarding how to make the language easier for humans.)
>
>

But you didn't talk with this group about the results of this test. And 
you didn't provide the data. Nor did you provide a description of how 
the test was conducted, nor the demographics of the volunteers, or how 
they were recruited. You took video, but then you said the video was 
proprietary to Google.

So, we have no idea how "humanly usable" this stuff is. I do know you 
should have discussed the effort with this group, and the results before 
making the changes to the spec. Everyone else has to do this, you 
should, to be fair, operate under the same restrictions and constraints. 
To be fair.



> > Microdata is not "a set of simple, open data formats built upon 
> existing
> > and widely adopted standards" (in fact quite the opposite really)
>
> Microdata is just a syntax. There are a couple of data formats build upon
> existing and widely adopted standards (specifically the vCard and vEvent
> vocabularies, strongly influenced by hCard and hCalendar) that have been
> documented for use with Microdata, though.


Shelley

Received on Thursday, 15 October 2009 21:15:48 UTC